King, 40, showed no reaction at the defense table as a court clerk read the verdict.

His wife's mother, Alevtina Solovieva, wept quietly in a back row.

"I feel no sense of joy over the verdict," she said through an interpreter at a news conference later. "Just bitterness that we lost our daughter."

Anastasia King, 20, was strangled to death by one of their tenants, Daniel Larson, 21, while her 270-pound husband pinned her to a hallway floor, prosecutors said.

The motive: King felt fleeced by his first Russian wife, and he was determined not to let the second one divorce him on unfavorable terms.

King's defense team claimed that Larson, a registered sex offender, acted alone because Anastasia King wanted him evicted and he feared homelessness.

After they reached their verdict, jurors told the lawyers that 2 1/2 days of testimony from King convinced them that he was the killer. After a five-week trial, their deliberations lasted only five hours and 40 minutes.

"Too many lies and too many inconsistencies on too many points," Deputy Prosecutor Coleen St. Clair said.

King took the stand on his own accord because he "wanted to tell his side of the story," defense attorney David Allen said.

"He wanted to have his day in court," Allen said. "And he got it."

King's eyes eagerly searched the courtroom as security officers led him to the defense table, but his parents, who listened to closing arguments earlier in the week, did not show up to hear the verdict.

The case was marked from the beginning by deceit and twisted subplots.

Anastasia King disappeared after she left her parents' home in Kyrgyzstan, a former Soviet republic, with King on Sept. 22, 2000.

When police questioned him 12 days later, King claimed that his wife had dumped him in Moscow during their return trip.

They returned a month later after customs records and an airline manifest clearly showed that the couple had passed through Sea-Tac Airport together.

Larson, meanwhile, was arrested Nov. 29 after he sexually attacked a Ukrainian immigrant teenager in an Alderwood Mall restroom.

When investigators questioned him Dec. 28, their interest piqued by King's visits to him in the Snohomish County Jail, Larson told them that King had killed his wife and had told him where the body was.

Larson led detectives to Anastasia King's body, buried under a dirty mattress in an unsanctioned dump on the Tulalip Indian Reservation.

The next day, he told the story he would later tell in court -- that he strangled the woman at King's behest while King sat on her chest.

As the police net closed around him, King scurried to arrange a better outcome for himself.

Eight letters surfaced to his best friend, Jay Yanick, asking Yanick to give him an alibi for the day the killing occurred, and asking Yanick to help press Larson to change his story.

After King's own arrest, a string of fellow prisoners testified that he enlisted them to pump Larson for information, or to change his story.

Meanwhile, Larson, who agreed to testify against King in exchange for a second-degree murder plea and favorable terms on his sex-crime sentence, proved to be a troublesome star witness.

At one point, in a letter to cult figure and convicted murderer Christopher Turgeon, he said he killed King's wife on his own because he believed she was an evil adulteress and God wanted her dead.

At other points, he told one of King's attorneys that he had played a part in the movie "Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves" and had ice cream with star Kevin Costner, and told a probation officer that a government chip was implanted in his head at age 6 to increase his agility.

On the witness stand, King's obsession with not losing money in a divorce, and his attempts to manipulate his vulnerable immigrant wife, shone through in his own testimony.

He admitted at one point that he salted her immigration application with forged letters, giving himself the power to blow the whistle on her later and to scuttle her attempts to gain permanent residency.

He admitted to ditching her in Kyrgyzstan during a trip there in June 2000, stealing her passport and other important papers in an attempt to keep her from re-entering the United States to contest a divorce.

Faced with e-mails taken from his home computer, he admitted to contacting another prospective foreign wife three weeks before Anastasia King's death, promising the new prospect that he would be free within a month.

In closing arguments, attorney Allen said none of the physical evidence supported Larson's story. There were no bruises on Anastasia's chest where King was supposed to have pinned her. There were no bodily fluids in King's car where Larson said they transported her to her grave. And the grave site was within two miles of one of Larson's teenage foster homes.

Chief Criminal Deputy Prosecutor Jim Townsend said common sense militated against King's single-killer theory. The 150-pound Larson could not have dragged the body 261 feet from the road to the grave site, he said, and the fierce fight that would have ensued if Larson had tried to strangle a woman without help would have left scars on both of them.

After an early 10-2 vote, the jury quickly moved toward conviction.

"They said they would have convicted him, anyway, but it would have taken longer" without King's testimony to sway them, St. Clair said.

The case has drawn statewide and national attention, and focused increasing heat on the mail-order-marriage trade.

Spurred by King's case, the Legislature is examining a bill that would impose new regulations on the trade in this state.